God Help Us If You Succumb To A Publicly Issued And Privately Enforced National Vaccination ID

Guardian |  God, I miss the pub. I miss pushing through the door and diving into a pool of sound, all chatter and laughter and sport on the telly. I miss the sight of people’s faces, friendly and relaxed and a bit flushed. I miss finding friends gathered around a table, bantering and gossiping, pausing only to place their order when I ask if anyone needs a drink. I miss weaving through the crowd, taking care not to spill pints or drop crisp packets, catching a flirty glance from a stranger out of the corner of my eye.

What I would give to go to the pub this evening and talk with my friends about everything and nothing. Since many of us work in technology, at some point the government’s “vaccine passports for the pub” plan would come up.

I’d say it is dumb. They would tell me that, no, I am the one who is dumb. We’d hash it out, order another round and set the world to rights. Sadly, it’s a conversation we won’t be having. We’re in lockdown. None of us has tasted a proper pint in months. We’ve had to debate what the prime minister, Boris Johnson, has called “papers for pints” over WhatsApp and FaceTime while sitting at home and walking in the park.

The good news is that pubs open for outdoor service from 12 April and for indoor service from 17 May. The bad news is that Johnson’s “papers for pints” plan is essentially a national ID card by stealth, one that would link our identity to our Covid status – whether we’ve been vaccinated, had a recent negative test or have antibodies.

The UK has already toyed with national ID cards. It rejected them in 2010. As Theresa May, then home secretary, explained in 2010: “This isn’t just about cost savings, it’s actually about the principle, it’s about getting the balance right between national security and civil liberties, and that’s what the new coalition government is doing.”

That was before coronavirus, of course, but just because we’re in a pandemic doesn’t mean that we stop caring about that balance.

Already, the Conservatives have announced plans to introduce a bill to make photo ID mandatory from 2023 for all UK-wide and English elections. There’s no obvious need for it: there was only one conviction for “personation” fraud in the UK in 2019.

The SMART Healthcards Framework

unlimitedhangout |  The SMART Health Cards framework was developed by a team led by the chief architect of Microsoft Healthcare, Josh Mandel, who was previously the Health IT Ecosystem lead for Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences. Verily is currently heavily involved in COVID-19 testing throughout the United States, particularly in California, and links test recipients’ results to their Google accounts. Their other COVID-19 initiatives have been criticized due to still-unresolved privacy concerns, something that has also plagued several of Verily’s other efforts pre-COVID-19, including those involving Mandel.

Of particular concern is that Verily, and by extension Google, created Project Baseline, which has been collecting “actionable genetic information” with a focus on “population health” from participants since 2017. Yet, during the COVID-19 process, Project Baseline has become an important component of Verily’s COVID-19 testing efforts, raising the unsettling possibility that Verily has been obtaining Americans’ DNA data through its COVID-19 testing activities. While Verily has not addressed this possibility directly, it is worth noting that Google has been heavily involved in amassing genomic data for several years. For instance, in 2013, Google Genomics was founded with the goal of storing and analyzing DNA data on Google Cloud servers. Now known as Cloud Life Sciences, the Google subsidiary has since developed AI algorithms that can “build your genome sequence” and “identify all the mutations that an individual inherits from their parents.”

Google also has close ties with the best-known DNA testing companies in the United States, such as Ancestry.com. Ancestry, recently purchased by private-equity behemoth Blackstone, shares data with a secretive Google subsidiary that uses genomic data to develop lifespan-extending therapies. In addition, the wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, is the cofounder and CEO of DNA testing company 23andMe. Wojcicki is also the sister of the CEO of Google-owned YouTube, Susan Wojcicki.

Google and the majority of VCI’s backers—Microsoft, Salesforce, Cerner, Epic, the Mayo Clinic, and MITRE Corporation, Change Healthcare—are also prominent members of the MITRE-run COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition. Other members of that coalition include the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and the CIA-linked data-mining firm Palantir, as well as a myriad of health-care and health-record companies. The coalition fits well with the ambitions of Google and like-minded companies that have sought to gain access to troves of American health data under the guise of combatting COVID-19.

The COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition describes itself as a public-private partnership that has enabled “the critical infrastructure to enable collaboration and shared analytics” on COVID-19 through the sharing of health-care and COVID-19 data among members. That this coalition and VCI are intimately involved with MITRE Corporation is significant, given that MITRE is a well-known, yet secretive, contractor for the US government, specifically the CIA and other intelligence agencies, which has developed Orwellian surveillance and biometric technologies, including several now focused on COVID-19.

Just three days before the public announcement of VCI’s establishment, Microsoft Healthcare and Google’s Verily announced a partnership along with MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute to share the companies’ cloud data and AI technologies with a “global network of more than 168,000 health and life sciences partners” to accelerate the Terra platform. Terra, originally developed by the Broad Institute and Verily, is an “open data ecosystem” focused on biomedical research, specifically the fields of cancer genomics, population genetics, and viral genomics. The biomedical data Terra amasses includes not only genetic data but also medical-imaging, biometric signals, and electronic health records. Google, through its partnership with the Pentagon, which was announced last September, has moved to utilize the analysis of such data in order to “predictively diagnose” diseases such as cancer and COVID-19. US military contractors, such as Advanced Technology International, have been developing wearables that would apply that AI-driven predictive diagnosis technology to COVID-19 diagnoses.

If A Representation Is "A Bid For Power" Then Google Already Rules The World

doxa.substack |  The other point that’s always stressed in the AI Ethics literature, is that in the hands of large, powerful, status-quo-defining entities like Google, there's a feedback loop: the models are released back into the real world, where they tend to reinforce in some way the very status quo that produced them.

This circularity of status quo => model => status quo is well covered in Cathy O'Neil's 2016 book, Weapons of Math Destruction. O'Neill is mostly concerned with the models used by Big Finance, but the principle is exactly the same — models don't just reflect the status quo, they're increasingly critical to perpetuating it. Or, to borrow words from the title of an even earlier book on financial models by Donald MacKenzie, these models are "an engine, not a camera."

Unless I've missed something major, a very big chunk of the AI Ethics work amounts to stating and restating the age-old truth that big, costly, public representations of the regnant social hierarchy are powerful perpetuators of that very hierarchy. That's it. That's the tweet... and the paper... and the conference... and the discipline.

In the formulation of Gebru's paper, large language models (“large” because they’re trained on a massive, unsanitized corpus of texts from the wilds of the internet) re-present, or "parrot," the roblematic linguistic status quo. And in parroting it, they can perpetuate it.

As people in positions of privilege with respect to a society’s racism, misogyny, ableism, etc., tend to be overrepresented in training data for LMs (as discussed in §4 above), this training data thus includes encoded biases, many already recognized as harmful...

In this section, we have discussed how the human tendency to attribute meaning to text, in combination with large LMs’ ability to learn patterns of forms that humans associate with various biases and other harmful attitudes, leads to risks of real-world harm, should LM-generated text be disseminated.1

As someone who trained as an historian, it's not at all surprising to me that what was true of the Roman Colosseum — in everything from the class-stratified seating arrangement to the central spectacle — is also true of a the massively complex and expensive public display of cultural power that is Google's language model.

Control Of The Most Powerful Politicians And Their Regulators Ensures Control By The Regulated

opendemocracy | From France to Australia to the US state of Maryland, the free press is waging a battle for survival against Facebook and Google. Besides being gushing firehoses of COVID-19 and election disinformation and QAnon conspiracies, another of Google and Facebook’s dangerous impacts is undermining the financial stability of media outlets all over the world. Where is the European Commission and the Biden administration in this fight? A lot is at stake, yet so far they have been quiet as church mice.

How do Google and Facebook threaten free press? These two companies alone suck up an astounding 60% of all online advertising in the US. With Amazon taking another 9%, that leaves a mere 30% of digital ad revenue to be split among thousands of media outlets, many of them local publications. With digital online advertising now comprising over half of all ad spending (and projected to grow further), this has greatly contributed to underfunded and failing news industries in country after country, including in Europe and the US.

Australia and Maryland

Australia’s situation is typical. Its competition commission found that, for every $100 spent by online advertisers in Australia, $47 goes to Google and $24 to Facebook,

even as traditional advertising has declined. Various studies have found that the majority of people who access their news online don’t go to the original news source, instead they access it via Facebook’s and Google’s platforms which are cleverly designed to hold users’ attention. Many users rarely click through the links, instead they absorb the gist of the news from the platforms’ headlines and preview blurbs.

Consequently, Facebook and Google receive the lion’s share of revenue from digital ads, rather than the original news sources receiving it. Note that Facebook and Google could tweak their design and algorithms to purposefully drive users to the original news sources’ websites. But they don’t.

So Australia decided to fight this duopoly with some rules of its own. A new law will require large digital media companies to fairly compensate Australian media companies for re-packaging and monetizing their proprietary news content. Media outlets around the world are watching to see how this plays out.

Google initially fought the proposal, but finally negotiated deals with Australian news publishers, beginning with media magnet Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, to pay them some compensation. But Facebook flexed its digital muscles by cutting off Australia entirely from its platform for several days, preventing Aussie news publishers as well as everyday users, including important government agencies like health, fire and crisis services, from posting, viewing or sharing news content.

The result was jarring, the proverbial ‘shot heard ‘round the world’. Facebook censored Australian users more effectively than the Chinese communist government ever could, prompting charges of ‘big tech authoritarianism’. Facebook finally relented to Australia’s requirement, in return for some vague and uncertain concessions. But the message of raw, naked platform power was unmistakably clear.

 

We Don't Even Need To Pretend Google Had To Show Obama His Location, Search, Or Browsing Histories

politico |  Few moments in the power struggle between Washington and Silicon Valley have inspired more anger and bafflement than one in January 2013, when antitrust regulators appointed by former President Barack Obama declined to sue Google.

The decision still rankles the company’s rivals, who have watched the search giant continue to amass power over smartphones, data-hoovering devices and wide swaths of the internet, unimpeded by laws meant to deter monopolies. It has fueled some lawmakers’ calls to overhaul the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that spent 19 months investigating Google’s efforts to overpower the competition — and critics say, blinked. 

The commission has never disclosed the full scope of its probe nor explained all its reasons for letting Google’s behavior slide.

But 312 pages of confidential internal memos obtained by POLITICO reveal what the FTC’s lawyers and economics experts were thinking — including assumptions that were contradictory at the time and many that turned out to be incorrect about the internet’s future, Google’s efforts to dominate it and the harm its rivals said they were suffering from the company’s actions. The memos show that at a crucial moment when Washington’s regulators might have had a chance to stem the growth of tech’s biggest giants, preventing a handful of trillion-dollar corporations from dominating a rising share of the economy, they misread the evidence in front of them and left much of the digital future in Google’s hands.

The documents also add to doubts about whether Washington is any more capable today of reining in the tech industry’s titans, despite efforts by a new generation of antitrust enforcers to turn up the heat on Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon — all of which now rank among the United States’ wealthiest companies. That will be a crucial test awaiting President Joe Biden’s regulators, including the outspoken Silicon Valley critic he plans to nominate to an open slot on the FTC’s five-person board.

Nearly a decade ago, the documents show, the FTC’s investigators uncovered evidence of how far Google was willing to go to ensure the primacy of the search engine that is the key to its fortunes, including tactics that European regulators and the U.S. Justice Department would later label antitrust violations. But the FTC’s economists successfully argued against suing the company, and the agency’s staff experts made a series of predictions that would fail to match where the online world was headed:

— They saw only “limited potential for growth” in ads that track users across the web — now the backbone of Google parent company Alphabet's $182.5 billion in annual revenue.

 

 

See For Yourself How Pervasive Google, Amazon, Facebook, And Microsoft Have Become

 theverge |  The Economic Security Project is trying to make a point about big tech monopolies by releasing a browser plugin that will block any sites that reach out to IP addresses owned by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Amazon. The extension is called Big Tech Detective, and after using the internet with it for a day (or, more accurately, trying and failing to use), I’d say it drives home the point that it’s almost impossible to avoid these companies on the modern web, even if you try.

Currently, the app has to be side-loaded onto Chrome, and the Economic Security Project expects that will remain the case. It’s also available to side-load onto Firefox. By default, it just keeps track of how many requests are sent, and to which companies. If you configure the extension to actually block websites, you’ll see a big red popup if the website you’re visiting sends a request to any of the four. That popup will also include a list of all the requests so you can get an idea of what’s being asked for.

It’s worth keeping in mind that just because a site reaches out to one or more of the big four tech companies, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily snooping or doing something nefarious. Many websites use fonts from Google Fonts, or host their sites using Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. That said, there are pages that connect to those IP addresses because they use trackers provided by one of the big four companies. The examples I’m about to list were selected because they’re common sites, not necessarily because they should be shamed. Fist tap Dale.

Patriot Act As Worthless As Patriot Missiles In A Genuine War On Terror

jacobin |  Nearly two decades since its initial passage in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Patriot Act has continued to linger in our collective memory. Though few Americans probably remember much about its provisions or specifics, the Bush-era legislation long ago entered into general usage as an synonym for heavy-handed domestic surveillance and institutional overreach — the words “Patriot Act” now being practically synonymous with secrecy, eavesdropping, and the rolling back of civil liberties under the intentionally broad guise of “national security.”

Given the law’s contents and implications in practice, this reputation is well deserved. Passing the Senate with only a single dissenting vote, the Patriot Act dramatically expanded the power of federal authorities to spy on ordinary Americans with minimal oversight: enabling the FBI to obtain detailed information about citizens’ banking history and personal communications without having to seek judicial approval and even allowing “sneak and peek” searches of homes and offices. “The Patriot Act,” in the rather blunt words of a brief prepared by the ACLU, “[turned] regular citizens into suspects.”

Predictably, a great deal of law enforcement activity resulted from the ludicrously titled law (USA PATRIOT was a backronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”). According to data released by the Department of Justice, the FBI made hundreds of thousands of incursions into personal phone, computer, and financial records in the years immediately following its passage — the utility of these searches in identifying or preventing actual terrorist activities being debatable, to say the least.

Despite passing with widespread support, the Patriot Act was still considered extreme enough for lawmakers to attach sunset clauses to several of its major provisions, guaranteeing their expiry in lieu of congressional renewal (which, incidentally, eventually came under George W. Bush and again under Barack Obama).

One prominent Delaware lawmaker, however, felt it didn’t go far enough.

Ahead of the nearly unanimous October 25, 2001, Senate vote on the Patriot Act, Joe Biden was regularly claiming the law as his own, boasting in an interview with the New Republic: “I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill.” Biden wasn’t wrong. In fact, key parts of the Bush administration’s signature national security law were drawn from provisions contained in Biden’s own 1995 anti-terrorism bill. Originally called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act, Jacobin’s Branco Marcetic summarized it contents as follows:

The bill made “terrorism” a new federal crime, allowed those charged with terrorism to be automatically detained before trial, outlawed donations to government-designated terrorist groups, allowed electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists, and created a special court to deport noncitizens accused of terrorism (ironically, when Bush had proposed a similar measure years before, Biden had denounced it as “the very antithesis of our legal system”). It also let the government use evidence from secret sources in those trials.

Calling the Patriot Act “measured and prudent” during an approving speech on the Senate floor, Biden would nonetheless lament the removal of sections from his 1995 bill that would have given police even more sweeping powers of surveillance.

You Robot...,

TNR |  The Buddha recommends practicing greater mindfulness throughout our waking day. The ultimate insight, however, is that when we peer within and try to gauge or pin down the elusive ego, there is nothing there. As Zen master D. T. Suzuki put it, the fruit of concerted and disciplined meditation is to see the “I” flapping like a loose door in the wind, coming off its hinges with each breath.

Halo, by contrast, promises to deliver only narcissism and self-obsession. The device doesn’t offer real insight into your inner states but reports on how you seem to other people. As Amazon’s medical officer Maulik Majmudar explains, “People are relatively unaware of how they sound to others and the impact that may have on their personal and professional relationships.” If you sound irritated, angry, restrained, or overbearing, you can adjust your tone and delivery to seem otherwise.

Doesn’t this invite you to second-guess every utterance and interaction and fret over how you look in the eyes of judging peers? This is the least helpful kind of self-knowledge since it is wholly insecure, constantly shifting, eternally uncertain. I can and never will know how others assess me—this is beyond my control. Trying to grasp this, or influence it with any consistency or certainty, is a futile chase and a recipe for madness. It evokes the anxiety that therapists attribute to social media use.

But if Halo is of little use to me, who is it principally for? Amazon has vowed that it will not pillage the data collected; Halo spies only for you. For now. But it establishes an important precedent and inures us to constant surveillance. Thus, it opens the door for hungry marketers. Surveillance is at the heart of the digital economy; it’s what makes, or promises to make, digital services superior. The more we divulge, the more precisely, efficiently, and effectively these services help us. They can tell you what you want before you know you want it. On the promise of personalized service and greater convenience, we invariably comply.

Why might marketers want to know about your emotional states? How are they benefited by knowing you are sad for 1.6 seconds at 12:30 p.m.? Marketers can take advantage of you in such moments and pitch products and services that you are susceptible to. As media scholar Zeynep Tufekci argues, it’s but a short step from identifying your vulnerabilities to creating them. If Amazon determines you are depressed, for example, it may know exactly what movies you will indulge in, what snack foods you will load up on—what “retail therapy” soothes you at that moment. 

Aren't Cybercommand And The Einstein Crew At DHS Culpable For The Solarwinds Fail?

politico  |  Pentagon officials are making an 11th-hour push to potentially break up the joint leadership of U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, a move that would raise inevitable questions about Army Gen. Paul Nakasone's future as head of the country’s largest spy agency.

Five people familiar with the matter told POLITICO that senior Defense Department leaders are reviewing a plan to separate the two agencies, a move lawmakers and DoD had contemplated for years but had largely fallen by the wayside since Nakasone assumed command of both organizations in 2018. The Wall Street Journal reported that a meeting about the proposal is scheduled for this week. Defense One first reported the effort was afoot.

If successful, the move could create major upheaval just as national security officials try to determine the full scope of a monthslong hack of several major U.S. agencies — including Homeland Security Department and the nuclear weapons branch of the Energy Department — by Russia’s elite spy agency.

Trump “talking about trying to split up the cyber command from the national security agency, in the midst of a crisis to be talking about that type of disruption makes us vulnerable again,” House Armed Services Chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said Saturday night during an interview with CNN.

On Friday, Smith sent letters to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, warning them against severing the leadership of NSA and Cyber Command. The two agencies have shared leadership under a so-called dual-hat arrangement since the Pentagon stood up Cyber Command in 2009.

Nakasone has led the military’s top digital warfighting unit and the federal government’s largest intelligence agency for roughly two and a half years. He has re-imagined how both organizations can deploy their own hackers and analysts against foreign adversaries via a doctrine of “persistent engagement” — putting U.S. forces in constant contact against adversaries in cyberspace, including tracking them and taking offensive action.

The four-star is beloved by both Democrats and Republicans, especially after defending the 2018 and 2020 election from foreign interference. Some lawmakers even joke they wish they could put Nakasone in charge of more parts of the federal government.

 

France, Its Muslims And A Template For The Great Resetting Of Your Civil Liberties

greenwald |  Whether out of political calculation, conviction or some combination of both, French President Emmanuel Macron has seized on the grotesque murder last month of Samuel Paty to push two extreme assaults on core civil liberties. One is a law, approved by the French Parliament on Saturday, that “ban[s] the publication of images of on-duty police officers as well as expand[s] the use of surveillance drones and police powers” — a new restriction which press freedom groups argue criminalizes the attempt to hold police officers accountable for brutality and excess force and allows the government even greater powers of domestic spying. The other is an even more sweeping measure that would, among other things, ban homeschooling and require registration of children with the state.

A state of emergency declared in France after the 2015 Charlie Hebdo murders and multi-venue terror attacks gave the state virtually unlimited powers to detain citizens without due process and domestically spy with essentially no checks. That resulted, as intended, in the mass infiltration of mosques by police informants, surveillance of imams, and even the sweeping up by police of large numbers of Muslim citizens who were never charged with let alone convicted of any crimes.

Anyone who believes in the necessity of free speech, free expression, privacy rights and due process — and that includes those who cheered the massive free speech rally in Paris after the 2015 Charlie Hebdo murders, led by some of the world’s worst despots — has to be concerned about the growing French demands for still greater crackdowns, if not due to a belief in universally applied civil liberties principles then at least out of self-interested concern that this framework is going to be applied throughout the west: not only against Muslims but against anyone deemed on the margins or fringes or inside the realms of dissent.

---

To explore the growing controversies over civil liberties and France — which are absolutely a harbinger of similar debates already occurring, with still more to come, throughout the west — I spoke with one of France’s most knowledgeable civil liberties analysts and activists, Yasser Louati.

FISA Warrant On Carter Page Enabled Obama Surveillance Of The Entire Trump Team

tabletmag  |  A few weeks ago, Americans learned, from a letter sent by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) to former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, that Rice had sent herself an unusual “email for the record” on Barack Obama’s last day in office. In the email, Rice claimed to be memorializing a high-level meeting of Obama officials in January 2017, at which they discussed whether to limit the information they were sharing with President-Elect Donald Trump on the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy, writing at National Review Online, concluded that the purpose of this meeting was to keep Trump in the dark about the extent to which he himself was under investigation. He concludes from the fact of the email’s existence and its odd timing that the device of briefing Trump on limited portions of the documentation was a tactic —one intended to obscure the fact that Trump was a target of the investigation, even if he was not technically the subject of it. In fact, McCarthy wrote, given the type of investigation, Trump was effectively the main target.

In establishing this, McCarthy alluded to an aspect of counterintelligence investigations and surveillance that Americans tend to know little about. This is McCarthy’s key passage (emphasis in original):

Whether eavesdropping is done for national-security purposes under FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] or for law-enforcement purposes under criminal statutes, the objective is always the same: to uncover the full scope of a conspiratorial enterprise. 

The point is to identify all of the conspirators, and especially to establish the complicity of the most insulated leaders. Carter Page may have been the surveillance target named in the FISA warrant, but he was of low rank in the alleged conspiracy. The point of monitoring Page was to determine exactly what he was doing and, just as crucial, who was directing him.

McCarthy’s point here means that the surveillance authorized by the FISA warrant wasn’t limited to the personal communications of Carter Page; it only began there. To understand the “conspiratorial enterprise,” investigators and analysts have to follow up on all the entities Carter Page is in contact with.

And they don’t stop there. A conspiratorial enterprise is bound to involve communications beyond Carter Page’s first circle of direct contact, so investigators need to look at the next circle as well. They may need to look further, depending on the communications patterns they find in the first two circles radiating from their named target. But under current rules, it’s the first two that government investigators can routinely gain access to in order to “uncover the full scope of a conspiratorial enterprise,” without needing to apply for further warrants.

This convention is referred to as the “two-hop” rule, and, like many provisions of surveillance law, has come in for criticism by civil libertarians. The original FISA was passed in 1978, before the internet age. After 9/11, information technology enabled surveillance operators under the Patriot Act, which complemented and in some ways overlapped FISA surveillance, to inaugurate a “three-hop” rule exploiting computer-networked communications to look well beyond the first-order contacts of a central subject (under Patriot Act surveillance, a terror suspect). This was done via presidential order and came as an unwelcome surprise to the public when the practice was revealed, and initially dubbed “warrantless wiretapping,” in 2005.

Nick Bostrom Proposed A Preposterously Butt-Licking Design On Your Future Little Man...,

Have one AI with godlike powers monitor everyone at all times but only interfere if a little man commits a thought crime that poses an existential risk. Bostrom imagines that you little men could easily get used to living in such a world, particularly once you  realize that it doesn't make any noticeable difference. 

Many little men already believe that there is literally a conscious being who watches everything they do - and - they're cool with that. All Bostrom is suggesting is that the status quo establishment implement an unconscious mechanism that monitors everything that you little men think, express, and potentially do. 

Think about it, FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, that doesn't seem like it's worse, does it?

Here's Bostrom in conversation with Chris Anderson, the head of TED. Bostrom suggests implementation of a system of mass government surveillance in which each little man is fitted with necklace-like “freedom tags” with multi-directional cameras. 

Information gathered by these “freedom tags” would be sent to “freedom centers”, where artificial intelligence monitors the data, alerting human officers if they detect signs of a possible “black ball” idea. 

We are at greater risk from societal collapse arising from poorly functioning social systems.  We are at VASTLY greater risk from our subjugation to the corporate profit seeking egregoric structure and the specific extractive interaction with the environment that this demonic construct demands. (our economizating virtual reality)  than from some sort of Pandora's box technological black ball. 

We seem spastically incapable of eliminating fission and fusion weapons while struggling to implement and benefit from superior and safer thorium fission power generation technology. Rather than using improvements in photovoltaics and batteries to raise the resilience of individuals and small communities to natural disasters, we are using them to make the overall electrical power distribution system less resilient. 

Fermi's Paradox doesn't pivot on black ball technologies, rather, it pivots on primitive status seeking within a perversely incentivized archaic material culture. Intelligent species self-destruct because they fail to achieve their own possible psychological development.  Fist tap Dorcas Dad.

This "Feeling" Better Start Spreading Through The Herd A Lot Faster

brucewilds |  Just how unkind the recent Covid-economy has been to the middle-class has been masked by the helicopter money flowing from Washington. This has skewed income and spending across America but little attention has been paid to those taking it on the chin. This includes the owners of small businesses and those making substantially more than before the pandemic hit. The evidence of the pain and damage being inflicted on the Main Street economy is going beginning to become apparent. It can be seen as we drive down the street and see move empty windows and for lease signs which are sprouting up like weeds.

Even the appearance of a coin shortage due to our government being inept is causing people to claim this is all an intentional part of a larger plan. It means businesses are using the coin shortage to stop taking cash. This has left some people wondering if those wanting the demise of paper money are using the virus scam to eliminate cash altogether. The pandemic and warning germs can be transferred on the surface of money mean that suddenly "money" has now been deemed "unsafe." The rumor is out that Nancy Pelosi has already inserted in one stimulus bill the seeds of "taking our currency digital." 

This would force everyone into the banking system increasing the government's ability to tax, track, and control just about everything. The complete transformation to digital currency would mean if the government does not like your business or politics they could just lock you out of the system. They could even charge you to park your money while the bank would be allowed to lend it out and charge interest on it. Eliminating cash is the first step they must adopt for this to work. It would lock money into their system, they would eliminate or control all alternatives to money so it cannot be diverted from or moved out of the banking or financial system.

As events unfold I have witnessed a growing opinion being battered around that something sinister is happening beneath the surface. This includes the feeling we are no longer in control of our fate. More and more the idea that form follows function and the winners were picked before all this started is being injected into the mix. This theory embraces the proposition the bottom half of society is destitute and totally dependent on the government which means they have been removed from the battlefield. Now that these people are no longer a threat, corporate and government collaborators are consolidating power and control.

You Realize Panic-Demic Is ONLY The Tip Of The Livestock Management Iceberg - Right?

While you sleeping, that other cat was steady creeping. Tried to tell you sum'n was up with those funky multi-state drone swarms - nobody paid any heed - now a minute later - come to find out deeply disturbing incursions were taking place prior to, during, and subsequent to this mysterious and unexplained public interval. If you don't understand exactly how bad this is, then school is officieally adjourned for you. Suffice it to say, there are levers upon levers upon levers available to those intent on implementing the aims of the Great Reset. Bad as it is, the panic-demic is a cake-walk compared with what's provably and trivially feasible to those intent on the aims of the new economic and social order. Think Chernobyl, Fukashima - and like a basic but elite hacker incursion - totally devastating and completely untraceable.

Forbes |  Documents gained under the Freedom of Information Act show how a number of small drones flew around a restricted area at Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant on two successive nights last September. Security forces watched, but were apparently helpless to act as the drones carried out their incursions before disappearing into the night. Details of the event gives some clues as to just what they were doing, but who sent them remains a mystery.

Details of the events were obtained from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by Douglas D. Johnson on behalf of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The SCU’s main interest is in anomalous aerospace phenomena, what other people term UFOs. In this case though the flying objects were easily identifiable as drones, although their exact mission and origin are unknown. Johnson passed the information to The War Zone who give a detailed account.

Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant is the largest in the U.S., producing over three gigawatts, 35% of Arizona's total power capacity. It supplies electricity to Phoenix and Tucson, as well as San Diego and Los Angeles. It is a critical piece of strategic infrastructure; during the 2003 Iraq War, National Guard troops were deployed to Palo Verde to defend against a possible terrorist threat. In normal times, as with other nuclear installations, it is protected by armed security guards.

The armed guards, gates, fences and barriers were useless on the night of September 29^th. According to the official report:

“Officer noticed several drones (5 or 6) flying over the site. The drones are circling the 3 unit site inside and outside the Protected Area. The drones have flashing red and white rights [sic] and are estimated to be 200 to 300 hundred [sic] feet above the site. It was reported the drones had spotlights on while approaching the site that they turned off when they entered the Security Owner Controlled Area. Drones were first noticed at 20:50 MST and are still over the site as of 21:47 MST. Security Posture was normal, which was changed to elevated when the drones were noticed.”

The drones departed at 22:30, eighty minutes after they were first spotted. The security officers estimated that they were over two feet in diameter. This indicates that they were not simply consumer drones like the popular DJI Phantom, which have a flight endurance of about half an hour and is about a foot across, but something larger and more capable. The Lockheed Martin Indago, a military-grade quadcopter recently sold to the Swiss Army, has a flight endurance of about seventy minutes and is more than two feet across. At several thousand dollars apiece minimum, these are far less expendable than consumer drones costing a few hundred. All of which suggests this was not just a prank.

The Great Reset Is A Worldwide Technocratic Coup d'Etat

mises |  The basic idea of the Great Reset is the same principle that guided the radical transformations from the French to the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. It is the idea of constructivist rationalism incorporated in the state. But projects like the Great Reset leave unanswered the question of who rules the state. The state itself does not rule. It is an instrument of power. It is not the abstract state that decides, but the leaders of specific political parties and of certain social groups.

Earlier totalitarian regimes needed mass executions and concentration camps to maintain their power. Now, with the help of new technologies, it is believed, dissenters can easily be identified and marginalized. The nonconformists will be silenced by disqualifying divergent opinions as morally despicable.

The 2020 lockdowns possibly offer a preview of how this system works. The lockdown worked as if it had been orchestrated—and perhaps it was. As if following a single command, the leaders of big and small nations—and of different stages of economic development—implemented almost identical measures. Not only did many governments act in unison, they also applied these measures with little regard for the horrific consequences of a global lockdown.

Months of economic stillstand have destroyed the economic basis of millions of families. Together with social distancing, the lockdown has produced a mass of people unable to care for themselves. First, governments destroyed the livelihood, then the politicians showed up as the savior. The demand for social assistance is no longer limited to specific groups, but has become a need of the masses.

Once, war was the health of the state. Now it is fear of disease. What lies ahead is not the apparent coziness of a benevolent comprehensive welfare state with a guaranteed minimum income and healthcare and education for all. The lockdown and its consequences have brought a foretaste of what is to come: a permanent state of fear, strict behavioral control, massive loss of jobs, and growing dependence on the state.

With the measures taken in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, a big step to reset the global economy has been made. Without popular resistance, the end of the pandemic will not mean the end of the lockdown and social distancing. At the moment, however, the opponents of the new world order of digital tyranny still have access to the media and platforms to dissent. Yet the time is running out. The perpetrators of the new world order have smelled blood. Declaring the coronavirus a pandemic has come in handy to promote the agenda of their Great Reset. Only massive opposition can slow down and finally stop the extension of the power grip of the tyrannical technocracy that is on the rise.

When No Lives Matter Economic Stimulus Could Be Tied To Vaccination Compliance

theatlantic |  Other researchers with whom I spoke echoed many of the same concerns about people’s possible resistance to taking a vaccine, especially if its rollout is botched. To avoid such mistakes, Michele Andrasik and Chris Beyrer, who are among the leaders of the COVID-19 Prevention Network, an initiative by the National Institutes of Health, have already started to test different messages for communicating the benefits of immunization to the public. As Beyrer told me, early results indicate that an emphasis on the importance of the vaccine for revitalizing local communities will be crucial. “A lot of people are feeling very isolated,” he said, “so we are building a lot around solidarity: ‘We are all in this together!’”

Because of the influence of the anti-vaxxer movement, the vaccination rate for measles has dropped so low in certain areas of the country that children from Brooklyn to Santa Monica have contracted the potentially life-threatening disease. It is natural to fear that the same could happen with the coronavirus. But this ignores the fundamental differences between the two diseases. “You can’t just take the anti-vaxxer mentality you see with measles,” Flier told me, “and apply it to the situation we face with COVID.”

But will enough people get it? What happens if, as the CBS poll suggests, one in five Americans refuses to cooperate?

According to the experts I spoke with, the threshold for herd immunity for COVID-19 is likely to fall somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of the population. Since about one in 20 Americans is likely to have suffered from COVID-19 by the time a vaccine becomes available, this means that somewhere between 45 and 65 percent of the American population will need to be vaccinated.

In the case of measles, herd immunity requires an almost total social consensus about the utility of vaccines. As some children have painfully learned, such near unanimity is difficult to sustain. But in the case of COVID-19, anti-vaxxers would have to convert a much larger proportion of Americans in order to have a similarly devastating impact on our collective health. Unless one in three—or even one in two—Americans refuses a vaccine that would allow them to go back out into the world without fear and protect their loved ones from a deadly pandemic, the U.S. is likely to reach herd immunity.

Again and again, the coronavirus has defied expectations about how it is likely to behave. We would therefore be well advised to reckon with the possibility that things could once again break against us. Perhaps this virus is not only uniquely suited to disrupting human civilization but also unexpectedly adept at beating our attempts to immunize people against it.

Gates Foundation Rolling Out No Lives Matter Human Livestock Control Technology In Africa

activistpost |  A biometric digital identity platform that “evolves just as you evolve” is set to be introduced in “low-income, remote communities” in West Africa thanks to a public-private partnership between the Bill Gates-backed GAVI vaccine alliance, Mastercard and the AI-powered “identity authentication” company, Trust Stamp.

The program, which was first launched in late 2018, will see Trust Stamp’s digital identity platform integrated into the GAVI-Mastercard “Wellness Pass,” a digital vaccination record and identity system that is also linked to Mastercard’s click-to-play system that powered by its AI and machine learning technology called NuData. Mastercard, in addition to professing its commitment to promoting “centralized record keeping of childhood immunization” also describes itself as a leader toward a “World Beyond Cash,” and its partnership with GAVI marks a novel approach towards linking a biometric digital identity system, vaccination records, and a payment system into a single cohesive platform. The effort, since its launch nearly two years ago, has been funded via $3.8 million in GAVI donor funds in addition to a matched donation of the same amount by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

 In early June, GAVI reported that Mastercard’s Wellness Pass program would be adapted in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Around a month later, Mastercard announced that Trust Stamp’s biometric identity platform would be integrated into Wellness Pass as Trust Stamp’s system is capable of providing biometric identity in areas of the world lacking internet access or cellular connectivity and also does not require knowledge of an individual’s legal name or identity to function. The Wellness Program involving GAVI, Mastercard, and Trust Stamp will soon be launched in West Africa and will be coupled with a COVID-19 vaccination program once a vaccine becomes available.

The push to implement biometrics as part of national ID registration systems has been ongoing for many years on the continent and has become a highly politicized issue in several African countries. Opposition to similar projects in Africa often revolves around the costs surrounding them, such as the biometric voter management system that the Electoral Commission of Ghana has been trying to implement ahead of their 2020 general election in December. Bright Simons, honorary VP of the IMANI policy think tank, has questioned the “budgetary allocation” for the new system, claiming that the “unnecessary registration of 17 million people all over again” represents millions of dollars “being blown for reasons that nobody can explain in this country.”

The Great Reset Presages The Rise Of Organized Global Authoritarianism

wikipedia  |  The International Trade Organization (ITO) was the proposed name for an international institution for the regulation of trade.

Led by the United States in collaboration with allies, the effort to form the organization from 1945 to 1948, with the successful passing of the Havana Charter, eventually failed due to lack of approval by the US Congress. Until the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1994, international trade was managed through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

The Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, which established an international institution for monetary policy, recognized the need for a comparable international institution for trade to complement the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.^[1] Bretton Woods was attended by representatives of finance ministries and not by representatives of trade ministries, the proposed reason why a trade agreement was not negotiated at that time.^[2]

 

In early December 1945, the United States invited its war-time allies to enter into negotiations to conclude a multilateral agreement for the reciprocal reduction of tariffs on trade in goods. In July 1945, the US Congress had granted President Harry S. Truman the authority to negotiate and conclude such an agreement. At the proposal of the United States, the United Nations Economic and Social Committee adopted a resolution, in February 1946, calling for a conference to draft a charter for an International Trade Organization.

A Preparatory Committee was established in February 1946, and met for the first time in London in October 1946 to work on the charter of an international organization for trade; the work was continued from April to November 1947.^[3]

 

Exactly What Does Come With Nextdoor's All-Expense Paid Kompromat Gubmint Vacations?

massprivatei |  Community platform Nextdoor is going to great lengths to become the go-to platform to snitch on your neighbors.

According to a CityLab article, Nextdoor is showering law enforcement with all-expenses paid vacations to their headquarters in San Francisco, California all in an effort to gain law enforcement acceptance and put police on Public Agency Advisory Councils.

"Charles Husted, the chief of police in Sedona, Arizona, couldn’t contain his excitement. He had just been accepted into the Public Agencies Advisory Council for Nextdoor, the neighborhood social networking app."

At a time when most Americans are concerned with just surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, Nextdoor views it as an opportunity to influence law enforcement and local politics.

"As part of the chosen group, he would be flown to San Francisco on President’s Day, along with seven other community engagement staffers from police departments and city offices across the country. Over two days, they’d meet at Nextdoor’s headquarters to discuss the social network’s public agency strategy. Together, the plan was, they’d stay at  the Hilton Union Square, eat and drink at Cultivar, share a tour of Chinatown, and receive matching Uniqlo jackets. All costs — a projected $16,900 for the group, according to a schedule sent to participants — were covered by Nextdoor."

Exactly what Nextdoor includes in their law enforcement paid vacations is protected by a corporate non-disclosure agreement. But you can be sure it isn't just a trip to their headquarters.

Nextdoor's excuse for influencing law enforcement and advisory councils is to allegedly "help [public agency] partners to share their expertise and experiences with each other and our product development team."

Bring It! Elites Are Ready For You...,

medium |  The American government and the elites who they work for are playing with fire, so no wonder they’ve begun to prepare for the uprising that’s coming.

Lee Fang at The Intercept writes:

“The Federal government has ramped up security and police-related spending in response to the coronavirus pandemic, including issuing contracts for riot gear, disclosures show.

The purchase orders include requests for disposable cuffs, gas masks, ballistic helmets, and riot gloves, along with law enforcement protective equipment for federal police assigned to protect Veterans Affairs facilities. The orders were expedited under a special authorization “in response to Covid-19 outbreak.”

The Veterans Affairs department, which manages nearly 1,500 health care care facilities around the country, has also extended special contracts for coronavirus-related security services.While the pandemic has coincided with a historic drop in violent crime across the country, analysts have expressed concern that the rapid spread of the virus will fuel confrontations.

There have been multiple inmate riots in response to Covid-19 outbreaks in prisons and jails, which have become dangerous hotspots for the disease. The economic upheaval and disagreements over coronavirus-related policy have also fueled demonstrations across the country.

…The federal funding requests contrast sharply with the rosy rhetoric from President Donald Trump, who has lavished himself with praise for his response to the crisis and issued optimistic predictions that recovery is around the corner. Last month, the federal government secured a contract to purchase 100,000 body bags to dispose of deaths related to the Covid-19 outbreak.”

If the elites are beginning to prepare for what they clearly know is coming in response to how this crisis has been handled, then perhaps it’s time for us to get ready as well.